History

June 16, 2014

Many thanks to David Lehman and Stacey Harwood for inviting me back as a guest-blogger this week.

I recall reading somewhere – maybe someone can help me with this – that ancient druidic rites, or perhaps they were Welsh bardic initiation rituals, included the following. You had to lie in a trough of water on a cold night, wholly submerged and breathing only through a straw, and compose in your head a long poem in a complicated meter. The next morning, you had to emerge from the water and recite your poem.

How many could graduate from that school?

I earned my MFA in the early 1990s from a reputable institution. I am, therefore, a Master of Fine Arts. Anyone who has earned the degree should take careful note of this particular passage from The White Goddess, by Robert Graves. In my tattered edition, the passage appears on page 457:

“Who can make any claim to be a chief poet and wear the embroidered mantle of office, which the ancients called the tugen? Who can even claim to be an ollave? The ollave in ancient Ireland had to be master of one hundred and fifty Oghams, or verbal ciphers, which allowed him to converse with his fellow-poets over the heads of the unlearned bystanders; to be able to repeat at a moment’s notice any one of three hundred and fifty long traditional histories and romances, together with the incidental poems they contained, with appropriate harp accompaniment; to have memorized an immense number of other poems of different sorts; to be learned in philosophy; to be a doctor of civil law; to understand the history of modern, middle and ancient Irish with the derivations and changes of meaning of every word; to be skilled in music, augury, divination, medicine, mathematics, geography, universal history, astronomy, rhetoric and foreign languages; and to be able to extemporize poetry in fifty or more complicated meters. That anyone at all should have been able to qualify as an ollave is surprising…”

Best of all is that “appropriate harp accompaniment”! He made no mention of poetry workshops or lying in troughs of water all night.

June 11, 2014

On my birthday today in 1950, Ben Hogan won the Unted States Open in a three-way playoff. What made it almost miraculous was that Hogan had suffered multiple injuries sixteen months earlier when a Greyhound bus swerved out of its lane and hit Hogan's car head on. Hogan, attempting to shield his wife, Valerie, from the impact, went to the hospital with a broken collarbone, broken ankle, broken ribs and a double fracture of his pelvis. (Valerie escaped with minor injuries.) A blood clot in Hogan's leg required emergency measures; doctors tied off the surrounding veins to prevent the clot from reaching his heart. As a result, Hogan’s legs atrophied. Would he ever play a round of golf again? The more pressing question was whether he would ever walk again.

Yet here he was at the Merion Golf Club in Ardmore, PA, site also of last year's U. S. Open. Hogan defied the skeptics, playing four rounds of superb golf, walking from hole to hole unassisted. At the 72nd hole, he needed a par to tie Lloyd Mangrum and George Fazio for the lead and join the pair in a June 11th playoff. Hogan's one-iron shot to the green, one of the great moments in golfing history, occasioned Hy Peskin's photograph, above, undoubtedly the sport's most famous. A year later Hollywood turned the inspiring tale into a movie, Follow the Sun, with Glenn Ford as Hogan and Anne Baxter as Valerie. Click here or here for more on Hogan's heroics. -- DL

April 27, 2014

<<Back at Louis Simpson’s house in Stony Brook, during the farewell party on the last night of the conference, a fight broke out. People were standing in pairs or groups on the huge lawn sipping their drinks and, without any hint that something was about to happen, fists started flying. When a few tried to break it up, a punch would head in their direction and they would in turn join the melee. I stood on the porch watching in astonishment with the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra and the French poet Eugène Guillevic. They were delighted by the spectacle and assumed that this is how American poets always settled their literary quarrels; I tried to tell them that this was the first time I had seen anything like that and it scared the hell out of me, but they just laughed. Looking back, I, too, have to admit that what we saw was pretty funny.>>>

March 28, 2014

I shouldn’t be thinking of Santa Claus in March. But, this picture I took in the desert behind my house was taken in October. Besides, I wanted to write something less heavy about language and words, their power to make a thing more itself, to make one thing another.

I showed this picture to my Elder, and he said, "Well, I guess no Christmas this year. Santa is dead." Which reminded by of Charles Harper Webb's poem, "The Death of Santa Claus."

For this post, I’m going to share an anecdote about Santa--

The Mojave word for Christmas is Nyevathii ivaak. The missionaries used Christmas day to lure Mojaves to church. They gave them fruit. They each got a piece of candy. Sometimes they even got a present.

Because Santa Claus was just as mysterious a white man as Jesus, the two saviors blurred together in their minds. Jesus was dead, they had been told, and Santa Claus appeared out of nowhere on the same day every year. Both Santa and Jesus seemed to have come from the sky, and they both kept ending up at the church. Hmmm. The conclusion: Santa Claus was the ghost of Jesus. Christmas in Mojave means The Ghost Came, means the ghost of Jesus is here in a red suit, and he’s got candy--he's Santa Jesus.

March 26, 2014

Words become words because we need them. I don’t know what they are before that—impulses, energy, trilobites, Hydrogen—who knows. But once they become words, I believe in them, the power and the glory of them. Even the ugly ones—those terrible angels of our mouths—beating like dark wings from our throats—savage, nigger, half-breed, chink, faggot, indian, redskin. We built them—like bombs—with our need to break each other.

I am drawn to the words that hurt me most—No.—I mean to say: I am not afraid to put into my mouth the words that hurt me again and again. The people who first gave them to me didn’t always tell the truth, so I take them in and spit them back out—the bones of them, the parts nobody wants to talk about now—and I tell them my way because I got tired of choking on them.

History is the name of the greatest American lullaby. When we know the words to it, we feel like better people, church-going people. We feel like we have learned something. Worst of all, we feel like it is over. This is what history really means to most white people: It is over.

It might as well be the title of all the history books in high schools across the nation—

Teacher: Class open up your It Is Over text to “Chapter 2: We Fucked The Indians Again But Jim Thorpe, So It Is Over.”

Tommy: Didn’t we read that last week.

Teacher: No, Tommy, last week we read “Chapter 1: We Fucked The Indians But That Was A Long Time Ago Which Means It Is Over.” This new chapter has blankets in it, and Hotchkiss.

No, the worst part is that when we memorize the words to History, we get sleepy. Our eyes are lulled close. Just like at the end of “Rock-a-bye-baby” nobody asks what happened to the baby because they’re already asleep.

What is my point? Words carry within them the dark things we have done and the dark things those dark things continue to do. It is important that we know our words better than anybody else.

This is what I tell my students: Every word. And not just that word, also the word it was before. And the word that word was before it became the word you are using. Know those words the way they were when they first meant themselves. The beginning of language must have been something else—each sound like an entire song—a want we wanted so badly that it began like a lightning spark in our minds and rushed downhill to the lamp wicks of our tongues where it lit into a word. Fire, someone said for the first time in the universe, and for the first time in the existence of the ear, someone heard, Fire—how it must have burned.

So if every word is Promethean, why shouldn’t I rivet them all to the rock and tear them open?

What a gift: to know every word a word has ever meant.

What a wound: to know every word a word has ever meant—

Our word for policeman translates to the people who rope you, and our word for jail is the place you are roped. It’s the same word we use to describe roping cattle.

The US government used to rope Mojave children, sat on horseback and lassoed them like animals. They put them in the back of wagons or made them walk behind their horse all the way to the boarding school, leaving their mothers wringing the hems of their dresses in grief. My Elder teacher told me this: Grandma used to say that after they rounded up Momma and the other kids and took them away, all the dogs ran in circles in front of the houses and ran up and down the river banks crying and crying because they wanted their kids back. Those poor dogs cried and cried and cried. They went mad with crying. Today, when we talk about the law, the police, the justice system, we are talking about those men on horses who roped our children and took them away. We hear the crying. It is not over. It is happening again and again in those words.

School, or huchqol hapoove, means the place they put and keep children. And they did—they took Mojave children, their best shot at crushing us. And once there—nyayuu hapoove is our word for closet—my great grandmother was given a switching and locked in a closet for the day when she was caught speaking Mojave.

Language is nothing if not violent—No.—Language is silent when it is not violent.

Our word for metal is ‘anya kwa’oor, which means it has a golden light. Metal came to us first in a prophecy, which translated roughly goes something like this: It will come across the ocean and land here. It has no head, no arms, no legs. It is oval-shaped. It will move through us up our shorelines. The metal that was prophesied was not the metal of pots or pans or rakes—it was a bullet. Anytime we speak of metal, we are speaking of the way it first came to us—sometimes by going through us the way bullets have always done.

So when I say know your words, I mean the ones that have shaped your mouth and your page. Look at them, listen to the things they have endured, the things they have done. Even if they are one part memory, they are also another part living. Maybe what I have been trying to say is that when you walk into the room of your poem and hear History playing in the background, you find that poem, you look that poem in the eye and say, Wake your ass up.

March 25, 2014

In Mojave, the words we use to describe our emotions are literally dragged through our hearts before we speak them—they begin with the prefix wa-, a shortened form of iiwa, our word for heart and chest. So we will never lightly ask, How are you? Instead, we ask very directly about your heart. We have one way to say that our hearts are good, and as you might imagine if you’ve ever read a history book or lived in this world, we have many ways to say our hearts are hurting.

The government came to us first in the form of the Cavalry, then the military fort (which is why we are called Fort Mojave), and finally the boarding school. The government didn’t simply “teach” us English in those boarding schools—they systematically and methodically took our Mojave language. They took all the words we had. They even took our names. Especially, they took our words for the ways we love—in silencing us, they silenced the ways we told each other about our hearts.

One result of this: generations of English-speaking natives have never heard I love you from their parents, which in their eyes, meant their parents didn’t love them. However, those parents never said, I love you, because it didn’t mean anything to them—it was an English word for English people. There is no equivalent to it in the Mojave language—the words we have to express our feelings, to show the things berserking in our chests for one another are much too strong to be contained by the English word love.

But after boarding schools and work programs sent them to the cities for work, our children stopped speaking Mojave—they were beaten if they were caught talking or singing in their language. Maybe when they came home their parents spoke to them all about their hearts, but if they did, the children didn’t understand anymore.

It is true, the Mojave language does not say, I love you—and it is equally true that the government was hoping we would quit expressing this toward one another, that we would never again give each other tenderness. While we don’t say, I love you, we say so much more. We have ways to say that our heart is blooming, bursting, exploding, flashing, words to say that we will hold a person and never let them go, that we will be stingy with them, that we will never share them, that they are our actual heart. And even these are mere translations, as close as I can get in English.

Despite Cavalries and boarding schools, our language is still beautiful and passionate—it carries in it the ways we love and touch each other. In Mojave, to say, Kiss me, is to say fall into my mouth. If I say, They are kissing, I am also saying, They have fallen into each other’s mouths.

The word for hummingbird is nyen nyen, and it doesn’t mean bird—it is a description of what a hummingbird does, moving into and out of and into the flower. This is also our word for sex. Mat ‘anyenm translated to English means the body as a hummingbird, or to make a hummingbird of the body. On a very basic level we have a word that means body sex hummingbird all at once.

I think of the many lame things people say when they want to have sex with someone--imagine how much more luck they would have if they came to you with that lightning look in their eyes and that glisten in their mouths and said just one word: hummingbird. And you would think: bloom, sweet, wings that rotate, heart beating at 1,260 beats per minute, flower, largest proportioned brain in the bird kingdom, syrup,iridescent, nectar, tongue shaped like a “w”—which means something close to yes.

Recently, an adult learner who is teaching her children the language in her home asked our Elders if they could teach her to tell her son that she loves him. They told her that we have no word for that. But, the learner insisted, I need to know because I never heard my parents say that to me, and I will not let my son grow up without hearing me tell him that I love him. The Elders asked her, What is it you really want to tell him? The learner was emotional at this point, her words had caught in her throat. Instead of speaking, she made a gesture with her arms of pulling someone closer to her, and then she closed her eyes and hugged her arms against her chest. Ohhh, one of the Elders exclaimed, Now, we have a word for that—wakavar.

Maybe there is no great lesson to be learned here, but when I sit down to write a poem, I carry all of this language with me onto the page--I try to figure out what I really mean, what the words really mean to me. I don’t ever want to say, love, if what I mean is wakavar, if what I mean is hummingbird, if what I mean is fall into my mouth.

March 24, 2014

At Fort Mojave, the reservation where I grew up and recently moved back to, I am not a poet—my work is in language revitalization. There are only three living Elder speakers of our Mojave language. My Elders and I work together—against history, against memory, and especially against silence—to document and record our language, to teach it to others, to make it live again.

I come from a life shaped by winning—in my first season as a Lady Monarch basketball player at Old Dominion University, I won 34 games and only lost 2. When I played overseas, I received bonuses for winning games. But in this new chapter of my life, the work I do with my Elders to save our Mojave language has tested the values that made me one of the best athletes in the nation. Language revitalization is, in a sense, the art of losing. The fate of our language exists in the tongues of the three Elders who still speak it and in the hands of those of us working to preserve it. It was a hard lesson for me to learn and one that kept me from sleeping for almost two years: no matter how many hours I worked, no matter how hard I tried, I would not be able to save all of my language. I would lose some of it, a lot of it. There are words that once existed that I will never hear, that my Elders have forgotten. One of the saddest moments is when my Elder teacher cannot answer a question, when he looks at me and says, You are asking me because you don’t know the answer, but I also don’t know the answer, and there is nobody left for me to ask. When I began this work, I did not know that I had taken on a job of loss. In order not to be crushed by it, I have had to embrace it, to learn to exist within it and be successful at it, as successful as anyone can be at losing.

While Bishop and I have loss in common—don’t we all?—her loss and my loss are different—aren’t everyones’? For example, in the poem, Bishop loses a watch: I lost my mother’s watch. If I translated Bishop’s line into Mojave, I would say: Intay nyanya ‘achinaalym.

But our word ’anya means more than one thing—and since Mojaves never had watches, it only recently means “watch.” So while Bishop can be overcome by the singular loss of her mother’s watch, an object that means and means to her, that carried away memory and emotion and love with it—the loss for my language and people is even more devastating and vast than hers. What I mean is, in the Mojave language, the line Intay nyanya ‘achinaalym can also mean each of these things:

I lost my mother’s hour.

I lost my mother’s sun.

I lost my mother's light.

I lost my mother’s day.

I lost my mother’s time.

Or maybe Bishop and I have lost exactly the same thing—equally vast—we have lost our mothers, we have lost our pasts, the part of our lives when suns and days and time were not measurements of pains or failures. But whereas Bishop might have been stopped by her loss, I must keep going.

Loss doesn’t mean to me what it once did. What I cannot do doesn’t stop me anymore—it now shapes what I can do and helps me to appreciate what I do have. I choose not to stare into the void of loss, but instead I step inside it, stick my fingers into it, put my ear to it, try to find as many words for it as I can. This is no different from the way I build my poems. I don’t run from the disaster of what history has done to my people and our language, I chase it down. Sure, I will lose some things, I lose something—a thousand things—every day, but I know that I can be both farther and faster, and what I will gather and succeed at in my losing is ultimately what I can save of my language.

“Vanishing Languages,” aNational Geographicarticle, opens with this fact: One language dies every 14 days. So, two weeks from now, there will be one less language spoken and heard on this planet. At Fort Mojave, we have decided that it will not be our Mojave language.

Soon after earning my MFA, I was lucky enough to meet the poet Ted Kooser at a writing festival in Idyllwild, California, and we began exchanging small notes and postcards in the mail. Most often, we talked about my desert and his barn, the slow back roads we both drove, maybe about the owl that hooted through his night, and if so, then surely about what owls mean to my people. Most of his post cards were his own illustrations. On the back of one that hangs in my office, he wrote: It might be that the work you are doing for your tribe will be far more important that any poem you will write. Of course, he is right.

March 13, 2014

In Billings, Montana my grandfather—a handsome young guy from Fayetteville, Arkansas—worked as a baker in a basement with a window that looked out onto a main street. This was the Great Depression. From there, each morning, he could see the legs of passersby, and from there he picked out the legs of my grandmother on her way to nurses’ training. The story goes on to include her jilted fiancé, a whistle or catcall (not quite sure which), the strategic pink bathing suit tossed over her shoulder as she walked down that same street and a decision to wed that took about 24 hours. I love this story for the specific place and perspective which tells me about these people, my family before they were my family. Billings, Montana helps me call into place a place I’ve never been. It helps me, in the words of Yi-Fu Tuan, “render the invisible, visible, …impart a certain character to things” (qtd. in Cresswell 98). Our grandparents and parents—all of those people who came before us—are, in part, a mystery. They knew the world before us. They were, at least, slightly different people before we came along. The fixture of proper names helps make visible that world we never knew.

Places, those areas of collective perception we have names for (home, the playground, Omaha, Chicago, Texas, The West) are conventions through which we offer a kind of stability to the world’s welter, even though our experience of places is, as much as anything, about change. “You know, when I was a kid, the city ended here, and that,” you gesture toward an expense of highways, shopping malls and office buildings, “was cornfields.” And the names that hold these conventions together are as certain and arbitrary as myth and as essential, though they are in general, but especially in America, the record of one or another kind of political, economic or cultural ascendency. To the winner goes the naming.

While Billings was named after the president of the Pacific Northwest Railroad, Frederick H. Billings, the English name is rooted in the word “sword.” Given the history of westward expansion and the indigenous peoples of the area, the name is indicative of “the winner.” To complicate things and reveal our American complexity, Montana is derived from the Spanish montaña, mountain. Names: The Crow Nation, Benjamin F. Harding, Pompey’s Pillar, Beartooth Highway, Montaña del Norte.

Proper names work like mailboxes, according to the philosopher, Saul Kripke. You may have visited Billings, Montana and so what you know of it—its restaurants, the light in the evening, the fact you lost your wallet there, its geographic expanse— all gets sent to the name. Now that I’ve told you the story of my grandparents’ courtship and of the etymology of its names, you have other associations that all add to what you already know. The name becomes, as Anania says, “a kind of stability to the world’s welter.”

Susan Briante’s Utopia Minus (Ahsata, 2011) provides such stability in her naming without dispensing with mystery. When I first encountered the book, I was on a reading tour with another poet. We drove hours from Oklahoma City to Tulsa to Fayetteville, Arkansas to Kansas City to Fulton, Missouri and back to Tulsa. We read poems out loud. We listened to Jay-Z’s Black Album. We talked about our formation as writers. We laughed at the various bumper stickers (Save the Ta-Ta’s) and the Moorish architecture of the Cheesecake Factory. We talked about Paris and Spain and our growing up years. Reading Utopia Minus on this particular trip felt both comforting and estranging: Another mind in its reading and attentions and thinking on the daily occurrences. A mind clearly engaged with, but also in awe of the world. The poems didn’t seem to keep much—if anything—out of them.

In “Notes from the Last Great Civil War Story,” she begins in the note taking of the day’s events and reading, but as the stanza moves, it turns towards a slightly eerie temporal meditation:

Our dog licks my teacup;

late dog

days of summer, I study

new urbanism, racial

uprisings, cultural memory,

patterns of glassworks

n some foreign field of sand,

“high mortality events.”

Death makes such a blunt box

such a 24 hour news channel,

video of a cypress tree

which refuses to grow

while a window

around the screen

goes from dark to light,

day to night (11).

This reflection on the passage of time presents us with a kind of desolation. While death keeps technologically rolling or being portrayed 24 hours, the window provides a natural world passage of time through its light and absence of light. This opening stanza presents the backdrop for the “great story” we’re about to hear in which General Joseph Johnston “removes his hat as the corteges passes” at General Sherman’s funeral—his old adversary—

While the first part of the poem is the speaker moving among the banalities of the day, her studies, the observations of reports of death within the temporal life and death, it’s the ending that reveals the naming that exceeds stability:

Woke this morning in Dallas

with Bentonville, NC

written on my palm (12).

It is the ending with the place names of Dallas and Bentonville, NC that provide us with two different energies—one, stability and the other, mystery. Dallas, in this case, is a place where the actual life occurs. The light in the window around the screen goes from dark to light. Dallas is that waking place, the living—with all of its properties. Bentonville, NC, on the other hand, works both as a place name, but also, as an allusion and one that arrives with ghostly properties. It works as both the name penned to the palm and forgotten about until morning, and as the site of a battle between Sherman and Johnston, the old adversaries, who came to terms after the war. Sherman’s death inadvertently leading to Johnston’s death.

Like my own Billings, Montana, these two place names—Dallas, Bentonville, NC— serve to stabilize what the speaker knows (and remind as to what she’s been reading/thinking about), but also to unveil mystery. Place names contain the unknown as much as what’s known, what’s stable.

February 25, 2014

In Leah Umansky's beautifully written and poignant first book, Domestic Uncertainties, readers will find failed courtships, nineteenth century novels left in ruins, and the "nomenclature for what is left." Presented as an extended sequence of hybrid genre vignettes, which use elements of poetry, flash fiction, and lyric essay, Umansky's finely crafted collection presents a provocative matching of form and content.Frequently invoking Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and other nineteenth century fictions by women, Umansky gracefully situates these female writers within the context of twenty-first century post-genre writing, a thought-provoking gesture that proves at turns reverent and destructive.

I find it fascinating that these hybrid genre pieces simultaneously inhabit and revise literary tradition. The work of nineteenth century women writers is no longer forced into male forms of discourse, but rather, Umanksy forges new possibilities for representing and depicting women's lived experience.For instance, Emily Bronte's famed characters, Catherine and Heathcliff, appear in fragmented, elliptical, and thoroughly postmodern prose.These stylistic choices suggest that as Adrienne Rich once argued, women should not write in literary forms that are hostile to them, but rather, should seek out new possibilities for representing their experiences.Consider "What Literature Teaches Us About Love,"

And after death there is no heart.And after death there is no unknowing for what could've been there is only what is.And there is only what has.And Love.Always Love.

I'm intrigued by Umansky's treatment of the poem as a space in which intervention into literary tradition becomes possible.Just as she re-imagines Wuthering Heights from a fragmented, postmodern stylistic standpoint, Umansky presents each poem as a theoretical act, an active engagement with the work that came before her own.Domestic Uncertainties is filled with poems like this one, which read as both conversation with and revision of received wisdom.

Along these lines, Umansky's appropriation of received forms of discourse for novel purposes proves to be innovative and engaging as the book unfolds.By presenting the reader with mislaid dictionary definitions, multiple choice questions, and fill in the blanks, Umansky calls upon the reader to assume a more active role, allowing them to participate in the process of creating meaning alongside the poet.In many ways, this also constitutes a radical and thought-provoking revision of the nineteenth century tradition that she has inherited.Umansky writes,

Larger than life; epically grand.Just give me the extra mile!If you call it a _________________, it's a __________________.You define what is familiar.Don't the homophones all sound like "you?"Make me:everything.

Here Umansky's innovative use of form leaves space for the reader's imagination, allowing them to situate their own experience within the narrative that's being presented.I find it fascinating that Umansky has revised not only the nineteenth century novels she references, but the relationship between artist and audience that these texts embodied. Here the reader appears as collaborator, an idea that not only destabilizes meaning within the text, but affords a wide range of possible interpretations, each one as rich as the last.

February 18, 2014

Hi. It’s Tuesday as you read this but I’m writing on Monday. I’ve eaten 1.5 English muffins and drank countless cups of ginger tea. Rusty water sputtered out of my kitchen tap on Thursday and then I spent most of the weekend dehydrated, avoiding the scary orange water, Sochi Olympics style. Boiling it for tea somehow seemed like a compromise today. Since it’s President’s Day I’ve been curled on my couch, prepping for my English 101 classes this week while glancing out the window, watching the snow blot out the buildings.

I’ve been writing a sample introductory paragraph and body paragraph for my students to identify the structural elements and model them in their own essays. I spend a lot of time conveying to them that I’m never looking for correct answers, that interpretation is various, and that I hope to learn from them in each class. But then I also have to make sure they can organize their paragraphs to coherently convey their arguments. Which means I don’t make it mandatory that they use templates, but I strongly encourage it for their first few papers. And my hope in making these sample paragraphs—which relate to a recent article they read but not the one they’re currently writing about—is that we can walk through them together and discuss what each sentence contributes and how the order affects the reader. And they can start to build more fluidity and connective tissue in their paragraphs. To substantiate the ideas I hope they genuinely care about.

So much of teaching poetry seems to be about enabling students to break down and reconfigure language in new ways. To dissolve templates and restrictive formulas that expectations of language can trap us in. How to embrace ambiguity. In teaching English 101, I’ve struggled philosophically with how to encourage specific structures and not feel like I’m facilitating the architecture of those very traps. Through this struggle, I think I’ve actually become less angry at language’s potential to silence. I work with these students to understand for the first time the difference between a thesis statement and a personal opinion; why a specific example is more persuasive than a list of hypothetical generalizations. My students tend to come to English 101 not yet feeling like intellectual citizens. And when they pass English 101, I think it’s important that they not only feel more connected to the critical process of reading and the potential to clearly express themselves, but that they can continue to question these articulations. In a sense, that revision is a mode of being in the world. And perpetually questioning and revising one’s thoughts is not a sign of weakness (of being “incorrect”), but of openness.

This might be a good example for my students of digression. Let’s get to it:

inter|rupture: publishes poetry 3 times a year. The current issue features 1-2 poems per contributor. On the one hand, it leaves you wanting more. On the other, it’s a good sampling and bios can direct you to more of their work if you like what you read. The format is crisp and easy to navigate and the poems seem short, though eclectic. Just from quickly clicking from poem to poem, you can see the varied line lengths and stanza formations, not to mention content. Go explore.

Day 2 Poetry Spotlight: Tina Brown Celona

Celona has one poem titled “He Had Never Had a Fine Time of Anything.” Here it is:

He Had Never Had a Fine Time of Anything

I have space around me but inside it is a screaming wind tunnel of bluish babies and zinc counters with candied squash seeds in small square dishes I try not to notice that my hair is growing white

before I have learned to walk the allure of the nineteenth century of the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries of the early twentieth century the appeal of the 1920s the objective method in the novel all these are relevant I haven’t got a theory

structure imposed on a medium a chalkboard and the periodic table the Musee des Beaux-Arts the Victorian couple on holiday the architect slipping away through the fog under carriage wheels and horses hooves trampled

**

Day 2 Brief Thoughts

Celona’s poems work through the history of literature and theory via her own body and her personal history of anxiety and love. Her books, The Real Moon of Poetry and Other Poems and Snip! Snip! heave with the very acts of these knowledge acquisitions. Her poems generate meta-didactic meditations that reveal a level of vulnerability and candidness I admire, that I can hardly attain in my daily life. And these reveals are coupled with an incessant questioning that never allows us to rest. She asks, “Where is the lie? in the poem / or in behavior.” So now on to her new poem:

The first two lines create boundaries that immediately seem confused. The speaker claims there is space—but what kind? Space for what? This external room is interrupted: “but inside it is a screaming wind tunnel.” Inside what? The speaker’s house? Brain? Whatever this inside is, it’s loud and cluttered. Haunting images of bluish babies spin around with typical domestic items that could be found on a kitchen or coffee table. This stanza unnerves me because it captures how easily we misperceive a calmness in the cleanliness or ordered objects when we enter someone else’s house. Or the misperception of stability we assume when we see someone who presents as put together. Delicately placed offerings like candied squash seeds rocked by emotional tremors. That screaming wind tunnel, that is the internal monologue that envelopes us, which we can never fully share. The messages we send ourselves that turn our hair white or the ways in which we distract and obsess ourselves to circumvent the “notice.” A metaphor for subjectivity.

The verb tense of the second stanza also jars me, “before I have learned to walk.” I expect the “have” to be “had,” in that I assumed the speaker can currently walk. The “have” throws the poem into perpetual learning, which juxtaposes the following list of quarantined literary eras: “the allure of the nineteenth century /of the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries / of the early twentieth century / the appeal of the 1920s / the objective method in the novel.” These are sectioned off, contained for easy reference in school and in criticism. Arbitrary historical designations superimposed on the messiness of life. And the suggestion of the overwhelmingness and weight of all that history and tradition making it challenging to confidently “walk.”

In this poem, though, nothing can be sectioned off for long— categorization and hierarchy are replaced by a feeling without a theory, “all these are relevant / I haven’t got a theory.” With the “got,” the last line is candid, colloquial. Yet, there is always something slightly detached or unknowable even when the “I” manifests. For instance, while the I opens up, we’re still left to wonder how or why these literary periods are “relevant.” And since relevance changes person to person (or lyric I to lyric I), maybe the theory shouldn’t be static. Instead, these eras can be felt, they can be got, without a theory.

Temporal organization of literature segues into the physical. The third stanza begins with “structure imposed on a medium” and the drops us into “a chalkboard and the periodic table.” Slate and a tabular arrangement of chemical elements remind us of the convenient yet often arbitrarily organization of that the way we see and use things. Like this poem’s structure is an chance 8-line stanza repeated; the form determines the way the content will be apprehended, and—to some degree—what the content will be; like subjectivity determines the experience and thus, the poem.

At the same time, through Celona’s poem, which references John Galsworthy’s novel titled The Man of Property (1906), the structure of the novel is itself collapsed and re-appropriated in another medium. In this last stanza, the very constitution of a man implodes along with expected syntax as the architect (someone who typically imposes structure on a medium) slips into the fog (a medium blotting out everything) is mangled under a carriage, “and horses hooves trampled.” The syntax allows us to read it as the horse hooves, too, are being trampled along with the man. In a way, this mash of bodies and movements becomes the frenetic wind tunnel and the follicle of white hair. Nothing is calm. And why should it be?

**

Day 2 Poetry Exercise:

1) Find the oldest non-poetry book on your shelf. Open to a random page and select a line. This will be the title of your poem.

2) Select 5 items in your house that interest you. Write them down. Then, translate them into loose metaphors. For instance, I could select a black bobby pin as my item and then translate it into “a lost mustache” or “a black matchstick.” Cross off the original items and keep the metaphors/new images.

3) Make a list of 5 things you “try not to notice” or think about.

4) Re-open the book. Open to a random page and select 5 words from that page of your choosing.

5) Weave these metaphors/images, lists, and words into a poem. Think about how you it relates to the title. You are welcome to add whatever additional phrases you want in order or this poem to feel complete. Share it with me!

January 28, 2014

For almost a century, Pete Seeger walked the walk and embraced the possible. He was a man who understood the power of art and the dignity and worth of each human being; who risked imprisonment and endured the blacklist for refusing to compromise either his principles or the Bill of Rights; and who worked locally to change the world globally and globally to change the world locally. But mostly, he was a man who never forgot that singing is joy and all of us are singers.

He sang with Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and Cisco Houston. He saved old American songs from obscurity and gave them new life in a contemporary context ("We Shall Overcome"). He collected folk music from all over the world and brought it to a new audience in America ("Wimoweh," "Guantanamera"). His "Rainbow Quest" television show of the early 1960s was a barebones production that featured as guests some of the most important folk, country, and blues musicians of the 20th century: Mississippi John Hurt, Richard and Mimi Farina, the Clancey Brothers and Tommy Makem, Johnny Cash, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Hedy West, Judy Collins, Malvina Reynolds, Jean Redpath, Bessie Jones, and more. His 1967 anti-war song, "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" was censored out of "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" as too critical of the President (it was later reinstated after fans of the show objected vociferously). In his later years, he devoted himself to saving and restoring his beloved Hudson River through the Hudson River Clearwater Foundation. He toured with Arlo Guthrie, his good friend Woody's son, to whom he acted as a surrogate father, for many years. In January 2009, he sang "This Land is Your Land" (all the verses!) at President Obama's bitterly cold Inaugural Concert (what a vindication that must have felt like!). Into very old age, he was still fighting for the rights and diginity of all people, once showing up unexpectedly to give encouragement to and sing some songs with the Occupy Wall Street protestors.

The song we all sang at camp, "If I Had a Hammer," was written by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays in 1949 in response to the government's charging the Communist Party of America with attempting to overthrow the government. In 1955, Pete himself was called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. In his testimony, Pete refused to answer the committee's questions, condemning their unconstitutional disregard for the First Amendment. He was found in contempt of Congress and sentenced to one year in jail (the conviction was finally overturned in 1962). Later, "If I Had a Hammer" became one of the great anthems of the Civil Rights Movement. The last time Pete sang it in public was at this past year's Farm Aid concert.

November 22, 2013

The day that Kennedy was killed Was the day before the Stuyvesant-Clinton football game. There was a rally in the auditorium And our coach who was from Texas or Oklahoma said slowly, carefully, “There isn’t a horse that can’t be bucked.”

Meanwhile half the school was marching along Fifteenth Street to Union Square and then up to Forty Second Street and Fifth Avenue and some got up to Fifty Ninth, and they were parading, Yelling, “De Witt eats shit” until they were stopped by policemen. I didn’t go. I stayed in school. That day I almost got into a fight With a fellow twice my size on the stairway And he laughed at me. A friend of mine broke it up.

In English the head of the Physics Department walked Into the room. He said, “I think you are old enough To understand this. The President was shot today in Texas.” I stand up. I do not understand. I say, “What” And I think, the President was shocked today in Texas. He leaves the room. I am sorry.

I leave early. The Clinton game is called off, And the series has since been discontinued. My French teacher is waiting for me. Smiling shuffling his legs Touching his teeth with his tongue looking at me He says, “There is a rumor that Kennedy was shot. Do you know anything about that?”

A week later I go to my cousin’s bar mitzvah Out in Long Island, and I bring a catalog with me From the Bernard Baruch School of City College. I want to be a stockbroker. It is windy outside and we walk a mile or more To get to the bar mitzvah And as I walk I talk to my mother And I think carefully of what I am to say And I narrow my eyes. It is a cold and windy three days after Thanksgiving And I point my thumb to my stomach and chest And I brush my scarf against my face And I say, “I too want to become President.”

-- David Lehmanfrom "The Presidential Years" in The Paris Review, #43, Summer 1968. Reprinted in New and Selected Poems by David Lehman (Scribner, 2013).

November 21, 2013

When President Kennedy was assassinated, the world stopped, then shifted. In the way we now talk about September 11, for those who were alive and aware that November day fifty years ago, “I remember exactly where I was when I heard” is a touchstone of personal history. Virginia Woolf called these instances “moments of being,” when the difference between before and after is burned into memory by our hyper-awareness of the extraordinary. We have precise and perfect recall of the smell of classroom chalk when the principal’s choked voice came over the loudspeaker, the polka-dot scarf our neighbor was wearing when she ran weeping across the grass, the birds singing in the leafless apple tree as the radio blared the news, because these surrounding events and images, however quotidian, suddenly stand in sharp relief against unspeakable tragedy.

But even if we have no personal memory of that day, whether because we were too young in 1963 or we are of more recent generations for whom the assassination is history, we still live with its reverberations. Kennedy’s murder shaped the second half of the 20th century, and in turn is shaping the beginnings of the 21st.

An exercise in probability andpossibility:

If Kennedy had not been killed, it is likely we would have gotten out of Vietnam by 1965. Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, wrote that the President had been working on a troop withdrawal strategy when he died. Would Johnson have then run for President in 1968? Would Robert F. Kennedy have entered the 1968 race if Johnson had run? RFK’s platform was to end the Vietnam War. If he didn’t run, would he still have been assassinated? How about Martin Luther King, Jr. – would he have been murdered as well? That’s harder to say, but even so would the nationwide civil unrest that followed these assassinations erupted in such a terrible way? A lot of the anger was fueled by the endless war and the feeling that the Johnson administration was leading us to disaster. So perhaps the violence and rage would have been tempered. It is possible.

If the unrest was contained and limited, we can also ask, would Richard Nixon been elected? His platform was restoring law-and-order to a country seemingly run amok with crime. And if no Nixon, no Watergate. If no Jimmy Carter as an antidote to Nixon, then no Ronald Reagan in response to Jimmy Carter? We can carry this on and on. As Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” We don’t even have to reach back to find it.

November 19, 2013

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here, have, thus far, so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that, government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

November 10, 2013

When I asked Peter Oresick if he'd like to drink with me, I suggested one of my favorite Pittsburgh bars, Big Jim's. Big Jim's isn't like the other establishments Drinks with Poets has featured this week; it isn't a re-done dive bar or a bar with artisan anything. It's, as I like to say, a bar-bar. A place where you can get a thin yellow beer and a shot of whiskey--a basket of fries. A place where the bartenders will change the channel to Law and Order as easily as the Steelers. Big Jim's is, as they say, "in the run." The run is a little section of lower Greenfield where many steel workers once lived, and amongst those families was one named Warhola.

When I asked Peter if he'd like to get a beer with me on Sunday, he said, "Of course. I'll be at church down the street. Why not show up early with your camera and I'll give you a tour?" The church, a conveniently short walk from the bar, is St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church. And this is the church that Andy Warhol himself attended all of his Pittsburgh life. Its roots are Carpatho-Rusyn, as were his, as are Peter's.

I have, for years, wanted to see this church, knowing the influence it is said to have had on Warhol and his work. Peter snuck out of the service to retrieve me from the street, and I sat quietly while the priest (who was going on a little long this day, Peter whispered) finished up. The heavy smell of incense--art everywhere. Crazy colorful panels of art. I could only imagine Warhol as a boy staring at this eccentric beauty, letting it soak in, taking it with him to New York City. And we all know what happened next.

We strolled down the street after church. A beautiful sunny fall day. At Big Jim's we wanted breakfast and beer. Over the murmur of TV sports, we pulled up chairs into the soft light at our table and talked Carpatho-Rusyn, Warhol, and poetry for an hour or so.

After church each Sunday, our clan
drifted to the opposite end of the block to my grandparents’ house for food and
beer. I grew up in a small Ukrainian immigrant colony in a factory town on the
banks of the Allegheny River. The priest gave us a sliver of wine-soaked bread
on a golden spoon; our grandmother climbed steps from her coal cellar to offer
chasers of beer.

Beer, back then, was a Pony Bottle of
green glass with white painted lettering. “Rolling Rock. From the glass
lined-tanks of Old Latrobe we tender this premium beer for your enjoyment, as a
tribute to your good taste. It comes from mountain springs to you. ’33.’” I
don’t remember what mystified me more: the painted white pony or the meaning of
33.

But my father always wanted “the prince
of pilsners.” “Have a Duke!” was the motto of the Duquesne Brewing
Company. Then, in 1963, the Pittsburgh Brewing Company changed us all with the
first pull-tab beer can. We loved Iron City from then on. And litterbugs were
born all over town.

Since my college days, I’ve grown even
fonder and more mature about beer. And extreme beverages. In central Turkey I
saw the ancestral home of King Midas and I met Professor Patrick McGovern, the
great archaeologist of ancient brewing. I’ve tasted his Midas Touch, and his
Chateau Jiahu from 7,000 BCE, and his Egyptian Ta Henket re-brewed from
residue in a pyramid chamber.

Beer appears in many of my own poems,
but here is an ancient poem--from a clay tablet written by a Sumerian poet
circa 1800 BCE--that is said to be the oldest. Na zdorovja!

Borne of the flowing
water,
Tenderly cared for by the
Ninhursag,
Borne of the flowing
water,
Tenderly cared for by the Ninhursag,

Having founded your town by the
sacred lake,
She finished its great walls for
you,
Ninkasi, having founded your
town by the sacred lake,
She finished it's walls for
you,

Your father is Enki, Lord
Nidimmud,
Your mother is Ninti, the queen
of the sacred lake.
Ninkasi, your father is Enki,
Lord Nidimmud,
Your mother is Ninti, the queen
of the sacred lake.

You are the one who handles the
dough [and] with a big shovel,
Mixing in a pit, the bappir with
sweet aromatics,
Ninkasi, you are the one who
handles the dough [and] with a big shovel,
Mixing in a pit, the bappir with
[date] - honey,

You are the one who bakes the
bappir in the big oven,
Puts in order the piles of
hulled grains,
Ninkasi, you are the one who
bakes the bappir in the big oven,
Puts in order the piles of
hulled grains,

You are the one who waters the
malt set on the ground,
The noble dogs keep away even
the potentates,
Ninkasi, you are the one who
waters the malt set on the ground,
The noble dogs keep away even
the potentates,

You are the one who soaks the
malt in a jar,
The waves rise, the waves
fall.
Ninkasi, you are the one who
soaks the malt in a jar,
The waves rise, the waves
fall.

You are the one who spreads the
cooked mash on large reed mats,
Coolness overcomes,
Ninkasi, you are the one who
spreads the cooked mash on large reed mats,
Coolness overcomes,

You are the one who holds with
both hands the great sweet wort,
Brewing [it] with honey [and]
wine
(You the sweet wort to the
vessel)
Ninkasi, (...)(You the sweet
wort to the vessel)

The filtering vat, which makes a
pleasant sound,
You place appropriately on a
large collector vat.
Ninkasi, the filtering vat,
which makes a pleasant sound,
You place appropriately on a
large collector vat.

When you pour out the filtered
beer of the collector vat,
It is [like] the onrush of
Tigris and Euphrates.
Ninkasi, you are the one who
pours out the filtered beer of the collector vat,
It is [like] the onrush of
Tigris and Euphrates.

August 31, 2013

I first heard Xánath Caraza read her work last year in Milwaukee at "Cantos Latinos! A Mosaic of Latino Poetry," a poetry and panel of quite diverse Latino poets assembled at the city's library. Xánath sort of blew me away with her reading. I recall her dark hair and a red shawl that, on her, resembled a queenly sort of cape, but what I remember most was the forceful passion she put into the poems she read, the wake-up punch of each word, how, the longer she read, the less her Spanish sounded like language and more like raw sound. I kept thinking of Shangó, the Yoruba deity (or orisha) of lightning and thunder and one whose presence is often associated with music, specifically the percussive power of drums. Her voice had that kind of command to it. I could not imagine a better title for her collection Conjuro, which is the Spanish word for a spell or incantation. She recently spoke to me from her home in Kansas City, and I learned as much about her consideration of culture and history in her work as I did about the sway color holds over it. "Poetry is a feeling of orange," she writes in "Linguistic Filigree." I wanted to know more.

ET: I saw you hold a crowd rapt when you read
in Milwaukee last year, particular with "Yanga," which felt like one of
the central poems of this book, both in its homage to how Africa has helped shape
Latin American history *and* because oral tradition has a powerful claim in your
work. Let's talk about Yanga first. Tell us who he
was.

XC: I fell in love with Yanga early in my childhood; we
studied him in grammar school. It captured me that he was a real person. He was, while a slave, a community organizer and was able to create the first free zone in the Americas in 1630. In a way, these slaves were unconquerable. The original name of the zone was
San Lorenzo de los Negros, but now this town is known as Yanga. I was always fascinated
with language, and I pay attention to idioms. We have all these words we know
come from Africa, and there are towns in Veracruz,, Mexico, that are named
after African voices. So Yanga speaks to the history of Veracruz, and I wanted
to put together Yanga's language and the Spanish versions of these words into a poem.

Louis Reyes Rivera, an African Puerto Rican scholar and performance poet, had a deep impact on me when I saw him in Kansas City. He was such a nice person when I met him, very
calm, down to earth, and then when he stood up to read, he turned into a drum,
like a conga, pounding right in front of you. I put all of that together to
create "Yanga."

Yanga

(para Louis Reyes Rivera)

Yanga, Yanga, Yanga

Yanga, Yanga, Yanga,

Hoy, tu espiritu invoco

Aqui, en este lugar.

Este, este es mi poema para Yanga,

Mandinga, malanga, bamba.

Rumba, mambo, samba,

Palabras llegadas de África.

Esta, esta es mi respuesta para Yanga,

Candomble, mocambo, mambo,

Candomble, mocambo, mambo,

Hombre libre veracruzano...

ET: Let's talk about the presence of oral tradition in these poems. As I read Conjuro, I kept feeling I was reading a songbook, a gathering of melodies that relies heavily on image and does so through a
prose-like style, which might attribute to why your book was a
finalist for multicultural fiction in the International Book Awards as well as for poetry in the International Latino Book Awards. Above all, I felt as if sound is king in these pages, with
consonants percussively clinking up against one another and a skillful
repetition demanding attention. I'd love for you to discuss the role of sound in
this book and in your creative life.

XC: I'm always thinking about rhythm; that is true. I
don't want to fall into stererotype, but I love music. I am Latina and whenever I
hear a song I like, I start humming and dancing. I grew up like that. I don't
feel like I should be sitting down when I hear music, and I think that is reflective in
my writing. I know that the way we remember a poem is through its rhythm. A a certain kind of beat can captivate us. "Yanga" is like
that.

When I read it to children, they also respond to that
rhythm without even knowing what I might be saying. It's very deliberate.
The trick for poets is to make it as simple as possible but with technique
behind it. We have to work our poems.

ET: I also thought the syntax and phrasing of
these poems felt as if they originated first in Spanish and then were translated from
head to hand through the act of writing. Did you experience this process, or
something like it, while drafting the poems for this
book?

XC: That's exactly how it happens. Creatively, I always
write in Spanish. And once I think it's ready, I begin translating into
English. If I have to write an academic paper or column, I can do it first in English.
But creatively, I prefer Spanish. I reached that conclusion a few years ago. I
kept editing myself while trying to write poems; I was hyperaware and I realized
that this was not going to work. Especially for the short stories; I was so
concerned to say it correctly in English. And then I thought, 'Let it go; write
in Spanish, and later worry about the translation.'

ET: During a recent interview over at La Bloga, you
mentioned that why you don't speak Nahuatl, you grew
up listening to it and recall its sounds, mostly rhythms that you describe as
"green
sounds, from the open spaces of my grandmother’s indigenous community." This presence of green, and of color in general, is
a vital part of this collection. Can you comment on your use of color and why it appears so
forcefully in these poems?

XC: I do not do it consciously, but I'm a very visual
person, and it is reflected in my language. Colors come to me, in one way or
another. Green is what I remember from my grandmother's house because she used
to live in an indigenous community in the northern part of Veracruz. Back then,
we had to travel nine hours from Xalapa, the capital of the state of Veracruz, and
all the way down to her house. The fields along the way were green. Where we lived in Xalapa,
it's a cloud forest, but by her it's very hot, very humid and jungle like.
Green, green, green. Una cupola de verde. And very thick air. I
remember thinking, 'I'm inhaling all that green.'

ET: We've talked about how Conjuro includes indigenous, African, and Mexican influences. But I've also heard you say
that the Midwest has its imprint on these pages as well, an unexpected
ingredient when considering an Indo-Afro-Latino blend of cultures. Can you tell
us how the Midwest has permeated these poems and
why?

August 28, 2013

In writing about themes including the sleaziness of the film industry, war in Afghanistan, the gutter nature of politics, and the absurdity of American life, my book Unable to Fully California seats itself squarely in a tradition of the American grotesque. Of course, Flannery O’Connor once famously stated that the problem for a serious writer of the grotesque is “one of finding something that is not grotesque.”

But to point at the existence of the grotesque as observer, i.e. include it as subject matter, creates a critical distancing from it and implies that the observer is not a part of the tableaux that inspired such art. But the waking up from this American dream often includes a tense realization that we are all a part of this intertwined society like it or not.

The grotesque exists at the local mall, definitely all over television, in the imminent political primaries, sitting at home by the fire, everywhere except in the wilds. People create a scenario that can be called grotesque, although the wilderness was the first common metaphor that implied a backdrop in front of which the early inhabitants of the newly formed United States enacted their grotesque scenarios.

Kenneth Burke in the 1930s called the idea of the grotesque an “attitude toward history” that is evident in contemporary life and a “cult of incongruity without the laughter.” What I sought to accomplish by sticking some pins in the film industry in my own first book.

E. H. Gombrich has written of the long tradition of grotesque motifs within the world history of visual art and names some of the work of Albrecht Dürer as being early examples of the grotesque in social settings.

The American author most typically identified as writing in a grotesque tradition is Edgar Allen Poe, but to that list could be added Sherwood Anderson, Flannery O’Connor, Sylvia Plath, and possibly also William Carlos Williams.

Grotesque

The city has tits in rows.The country is in the main—male,It butts me with blunt stub-horns,Forces me to oppose itOr be trampled.

The city is full of milkAnd lies still for the most part.These crack skullsAnd spill brainsAgainst her stomach.

(1914)

The poem still has a slight shock value. But mere shock is never the goal of the grotesque. The poem begins with what could be a description of milk bottles lined up in rows along a city street. A sight probably not seen in the country but we’re left to wonder how the action in the poem will be resolved. It ends with a fairly graphic depiction of violence that might describe the outdated practice of consuming lambs brains during pregnancy. What makes this grotesque is that we don’t quite know. Williams offers this partial portrait to heighten the effect of the grotesque.

Taken to its logical conclusion the tradition of the grotesque in America also includes some of the best rock ‘n roll. Musical poets such as the Lou Reed of the albums Berlin and Sally Can’t Dance offer grotesque portraits of decadence and trash. The style originated by Richard Hell points to the grotesque.

And although the wilderness constituted the setting for many an early American depiction of the grotesque, Sir Thomas Browne in Religio Medici, as early as 1643, had removed the idea of the grotesque from any natural setting, and placed it in the domain of art and “human intentionality” according to James Goodwin by writing “There are no Grotesques in nature; nor any thing framed to fill up empty cantons, and unnecessary spaces.” The idea of the grotesque, which started as a visual design element including depictions of “rude” people that set off a subject that comparatively speaking might look placid and serene includes the urban and also the urbane.

It’s always in the everyday that the grotesque is most readily apparent.

According to Goodwin it was Henry James who faulted the French poet Charles Baudelaire for being responsible for single-handedly dragging art down into the dumps and “besmirching” and “bespattering” art with common interests that degraded its integrity and reduced its stature.

The line in visual art that started as the connection that can be drawn between Honoré Daumier’s famous painting, “Rue Transnonain, le 15 avril 1834”, which shows a man dead on the floor apparently knifed, and the still-life journalism of the photographer WeeGee whose photos often depicted grisly scenes of street crimes continues now with the photography of Diane Arbus. Rather than shock modern audiences, however, often the grotesque now may produce a wry smile.

It seems certain that there is no shortage of the grotesque in American life and it’s natural to, as a condition of being, be fascinated by it. Especially in America we like a spectacle, and as observers of media it’s that distancing that makes us feel separate from it—as we sit surrounded by it in our living rooms.

August 27, 2013

Given the difficulty Americans seem to have finding any common ground on the question of gun control, unsurprisingly, as a poet, I hear a particular poem rise up in my memory to provide a quiet but definitive answer. In fact, this particular poem is known for its haunting quality and its orchestral force that contradicts its seeming simplicity. I’m writing about Emily Dickinson’s “My Life It Stood – A Loaded Gun (764).”

No one would turn to the poetry of Emily Dickinson to find solutions to the current American gun control issue, which is why the possibility intrigues me. (If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is Florida.)

Rather than point to what the poem might mean, I’m more interested in Dickinson’s description, which provides such indelible force. Buoyed by an off-kilter rhythmic sensibility that required extreme daring and skill to execute, the first two stanzas provide some of the best lines of poetry ever written by an American. With a deadpan subtlety, Dickinson’s implication that the mountains’ echo to the report of the gun completes a tableau where the reader is able to visualize the action so seamlessly it actually feels as though we are also a part of that picture caught within the frame of the poem. In fact, the entire poem has a filmic quality. The action that drives this poem could easily serve as the plot for a short experimental film.

And now We roam in Sovereign Woods -And now We hunt the Doe -And every time I speak for Him -The Mountains straight reply -

And do I smile, such cordial lightUpon the Valley glow -It is as a Vesuvian faceHad let its pleasure through -

And when at Night - Our good Day done -I guard My Master’s Head -’Tis better than the Eider-Duck’sDeep Pillow - to have shared -

To foe of His - I'm deadly foe - None stir the second time -On whom I lay a Yellow Eye -Or an emphatic Thumb -

Though I than He - may longer liveHe longer must - than I -For I have but the power to kill,Without - the power to die -

With the line “The Mountains straight reply -” Dickinson provides such a convincing psychological photograph that, once this fiery image appears in the imagination of the reader, it’s nearly impossible to extinguish. The image is lasting because it’s provided in such stark contrast: we nearly expect the fourth line of that second stanza to rhyme with its second line because that’s the expectation created by the first stanza. This defiant unexpectedness gives the line its subtle visual force.

Edwin Denby, another poet able to do this, wrote poetry known for a somewhat elegiac mood, a certain bittersweet severity, and a terseness or brevity. Although Denby’s poetry also contains much wry humor, each short poem can seem like a photographic still-life, as consistently captured through stark description, a portrait of the details of his metropolitan life.

Without much of the surrealist quality that attracted me to other New York School writers, there has always been a quality to the poetry of Edwin Denby that satisfies on an almost visual level. In lines such as:

New York dark in August, seawardCreeping breeze, building to buildingOld poems by Frank O’HaraAt 3 a.m. I sit readingLike a blue-black surf rider, sharkNipping at my Charvet tie, toe-tiedHeart in my mouth—or my New YorkAt dawn smiling I turn out the lightInside out like a room in grittyGale, features moving fierce or voidIntimate, the lunch hour cityOne’s own heart eating undestroyedComplicities of New York speechEmbrace me as I fall asleep

The scene is set in very few words, and the reader is immediately subsumed in Denby’s world. There is almost a painful clarity that, if not lingered upon because of its conversational tone, can almost be missed entirely. The drama provided by much of Denby’s work is somewhat muted but always very human. But the mechanical function of lines such as “At dawn smiling I turn out the light/Inside out like a room in gritty/Gale, features moving fierce or void/Intimate…” provide a big return on your investment of minimal time.

Denby shifts in his poetry very quickly from macro to micro and back, which is that at which Dickinson excelled. Other than simply gleaning the details and preoccupations of both writers as those qualities are displayed in the literal meaning inherent in the poems, this poet still marvels at how the visual aspects of the work of these two poets can absolutely haunt the mind.

August 26, 2013

André Breton's agenda to destroy bourgeois forms of consciousness with the exploration of desire as "a theatre of provocations" is possibly most apparent and memorable in his poem from 1931, "Free Union." In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images on Facebook I came upon a request made by Mark Lamoureux for surrealist love poems for a wedding ceremony and saw a comment by Noah Eli Gordon that Mark ought not to choose "Free Union" because it objectifies women. I would submit that

"Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions."

So, in Breton's conception of this poem there is no true object. Not in any typical sense. I would argue that in Breton's conception of this poem the images presented and the result is to show through some small crack in our realities that women, men, and all of the objects in our world are much larger than we previously supposed and also conjoined. The lightning released by the poem is bizarre, haunting, and does indeed contain some baroque element of schlock. This is absolutely why I love it. Most have stated that it actually memorializes a particular woman and wasn't directed toward women.

Whether modern society has supplanted our primal consciousness with some false rationality is debatable, perhaps, but the poem "Free Union," even its title, seeks to conjoin the disparate elements of our being through an analysis of what drives us on our most elemental level--desire. Reader, please substitute the word "wife" in the poem with "husband" or any other number of words--the goal is some indefinable totality that is supra-conscious.

Unlike Thomas Campion's "There is a Garden in Her Face," the famous poem published in 1617, i.e.,

There is a garden in her face

Where roses and white lilies grow;

A heav'nly paradise is that place

Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow.

Breton seeks to cross the chasm inherent in the blason as it existed since Clément Marot's time in 1536 by using an apparition of the form to praise but he does so by skipping a crucial step. To Breton his

... wife whose hair is a brush fire

Whose thoughts are summer lightning

Whose waist is an hourglass

Whose waist is the waist of an otter caught in the teeth of a tiger

Whose mouth is a bright cockade with the fragrance of a star of the first magnitude

Whose teeth leave prints like the tracks of white mice over snow

Whose tongue is made out of amber and polished glass

Whose tongue is a stabbed wafer

The tongue of a doll with eyes that open and shut

Whose tongue is an incredible stone

My wife whose eyelashes are strokes in the handwriting of a child

Whose eyebrows are nests of swallows

My wife whose temples are the slate of greenhouse roofs

With steam on the windows

My wife whose shoulders are champagne

Are fountains that curl from the heads of dolphins over the ice

My wife whose wrists are matches

Whose fingers are raffles holding the ace of hearts

Whose fingers are fresh cut hay

My wife with the armpits of martens and beech fruit

And Midsummer Night

That are hedges of privet and resting places for sea snails

Whose arms are of sea foam and a landlocked sea

And a fusion of wheat and a mill

Whose legs are spindles

In the delicate movements of watches and despair

My wife whose calves are sweet with the sap of elders

Whose feet are carved initials

Keyrings and the feet of steeplejacks

My wife whose neck is fine milled barley

Whose throat contains the Valley of God

And encounters in the bed of the maelstrom

My wife whose breasts are of night

—

And are undersea molehills

And crucibles of rubies

My wife whose breasts are haunted by the ghosts of dew-moistened roses

Whose belly is a fan unfolded in the sunlight

Is a giant talon

My wife with the back of a bird in vertical flight

With a back of quicksilver

And bright lights

My wife whose nape is of smooth worn stone and white chalk

And of a glass slipped through the fingers of someone who has just drunk

My wife with the thighs of a skiff

That are lustrous and feathered like arrows

Stemmed with the light tailbones of a white peacock

And imperceptible balance

My wife whose rump is sandstone and flax

Whose rump is the back of a swan and the spring

My wife with the sex of an iris

A mine and a platypus

With the sex of an alga and old-fashioned candles

My wife with the sex of a mirror

My wife with eyes full of tears

With eyes that are purple armour and a magnetized needle

With eyes of savannahs

With eyes full of water to drink in prisons

My wife with eyes that are forests forever under the axe

My wife with eyes that are the equal of water and air and earth and fire

(trans. by David Antin)

The poem confounds our preconceptions, driving us toward a point where we begin to question our learned associations and free-fall through the sensory impressions of the poem, if we submit to it, which guides us toward a reckoning with what we thought was reality. His wife, on an elemental level, absolutely is. The equation “this is that” runs throughout. The surrealist biomorphic melds all into one and transcends boundaries, rather than providing mere simile (think Robert Burns, “My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose,” 1794).

“My wife with eyes of savannahs” as a line of poetry may be easy to disparage but as evidence of the Surrealist plot it is Exhibit A. This is just a single poem in a concerted worldwide movement that attempted nothing less than the overthrow of time itself.

This poem is an attempt to map the dark matter, even if its center is the rather formulaic "my wife." For Breton poetry was just a beginning point and the goal was a revolution of mind and a total liberation from the self-imposed confines of the dualities that prevent our full awareness. A reverse engineering of surrealist method doesn't do much justice to its otherworldly aims.

July 19, 2013

Yvan Goll (1891-1950) was a poet, playwright, novelist, and translator born in Alsace-Lorraine who wrote in German, French, and English. He later lived in Paris and the U.S. and was an active part of the literary circles in Paris and Greenwich Village, along with his wife, Claire Goll. In the final years of his life, suffering from leukemia, he devoted himself to writing the poems of Das Traumkraut, translated as Dreamweedby Nan Watkins and recently released in a bilingual edition by Black Lawrence Press. (See an interview with Watkins at The Brooklyn Rail.)

These poems, written in pain and in the knowledge of impending death, possess a hallucinatory urgency that ought rightly to earn them a place among the great lyric works of the 20th century in any language. So that his pain not be wasted, Goll transformed it into the kind of art that perhaps only the dying genius can create. For the true artist, nothing is wasted--not even suffering, not even death. Read Dreamweed and you will see that Goll was a true artist, to the end.